I Blame Dennis Hopper (19 page)

I don't remember anything that happened, but afterward Robert Morton came up to me, put his hand on my shoulder as if he were a priest, and said, “That went well.
Dave is happy.
You will be back.” I felt anointed.

Overnight I became “that girl from
Cape Fear
.” I was walking down the street, and someone yelled out, “Hey! I saw you on
Letterman
! You're that girl from
Cape Fear
!” I knew I'd never have to sell another table. When the movie opened a few days after my appearance on
Letterman
, the phrase became my constant companion. I was at a party in Los Angeles when Barbra Streisand—sounding very much like Barbra Streisand—suddenly looked at me and said, “You're that girl from
Cape Fear
. You were very good.” People (such as Roddy McDowall) called and took me to lunch. I was pulled out of a line of people waiting for tickets to watch the filming of
Seinfeld
and was asked, “Why are you standing in line? You're that girl from
Cape Fear
!”

I was auditioning a lot but with mixed results. It took three auditions to get a role in Spike Lee's
Jungle Fever
. The night we shot, the cinematographer, Ernest Dickerson, laughed at everything I said. Spike, if he really liked something, gave you a kind of half smile. He was a great, albeit tough audience. The part got cut. I worked with Woody Allen in
Husbands and Wives
. It snowed the day we shot, and I could not believe I was staring at another great cinematographer, Carlo Di Palma, as he lighted a set. I thought, My God, I have made it. I will probably be in every Woody Allen movie. Annie Hall Douglas.

My part got cut. I went to an early screening and nobody had told me I was no longer in the movie. I think Marty was more upset than I was. The nerve to cut another director's girlfriend out of your movie. I wrote in my journal, “I am an actor. I go from job to job. Although the job let me down, I will continue to prosper.” I was right. After all that work trying to be in a movie, the producers of
Cape Fear
—Amblin Entertainment and Steven Spielberg's producers, Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, who I had met at the premiere—put me in
Alive
and I could not have been more grateful. I wrote, “It was a good thing, because I had no more furniture to sell.”

I was looking out at the Canadian Rockies and thinking, Here I was, a working actress. Going from job to job. About to shoot
Alive
. But I was worried. It was March 13, 1992. Friday the 13th. I was flying on a plane over mountains about to shoot a movie about a plane crash, based on the real life crash in the Andes of a plane that had also flown on Friday the 13th—on October 13, 1972. I was reading the book that our movie was adapting,
Alive,
by Piers Paul Read, trying to keep it in my lap, understanding that it might not be what your fellow passenger wants to see you reading. The guy next to me noticed it and reminded me, good-naturedly, that it was Friday the 13th and asked, “Are you at all superstitious?”

As we were passing over the mountains there was some turbulence, and I laughed it off, but it got me thinking that I
was
superstitious. But I figured that flying on Friday the 13th to make a plane-crash movie was either a good omen, or a really, really bad one. There were other things I was scared about. I was leaving Marty for what would be our first separation in four years. Would things be the same when I got back? He was also about to shoot
The Age of Innocence
. I was supposed to have played the small part of Daniel Day-Lewis's sister, but I had to give that up, since the shooting of
Alive
forced us to be on set every day whether we were on camera or not. The juxtaposing of our films did not go unnoticed by Marty and me. He would be depicting the life of upper crust New York society, shooting in mansions that featured sumptuous banquets. I would be living in the Canadian Rockies, possibly sleeping in a tent, starving, with a bunch of guys on top of a mountain. He packed me off with three books,
Silence
,
The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
and
The Brothers Karamazov
. They were all about suffering!

Alive
would be a long, arduous, physically and mentally demanding movie. I knew that because back in sunny California, the director Frank Marshall and his wife, the producer Kathleen Kennedy, had personally interviewed actors to make sure they knew what they were in for. There would be risks. We would be living in the wilderness of the Canadian Rockies in a place called Panorama. There would be bears there! I would be the only woman in a cast of men to fly by helicopter to the Delphine Glacier—12,000 feet up—where we would shoot most of the film. The temperature would reach 30 below in minutes. Blizzards and whiteouts could develop instantly. We would very possibly be snowed in. We would shoot six-day weeks. There was also no end date; you were simply agreeing to be there for the run of the picture. However long it took. To re-create the accuracy of the story of
Alive
, we would be contracted to lose up to fifteen pounds on a special “survivors” diet.

You'd think I'd be running for the door, right? That's what was so awesome about Frank and Kathy. All the while they were detailing the dangers that could surround me, they had huge smiles on their faces. After all, they explained, they'd worked in the Venezuelan jungle for
Arachnophobia
. Shot in the Serengeti for
The Color Purple
. They made
Alive
and its disturbing story line seem like a picnic. No pun intended. Frank said, “We wanted to shoot it in the Andes, but we couldn't figure out a way to get the equipment there, so we found the last sister plane of
The Fairchild
, the exact plane that crashed in the Andes, and replicated the crash site.” They wanted total authenticity. He took out storyboards and showed me side-by-side photos of a recently destroyed airplane in the snow on the Delphine Glacier next to pictures of the actual plane-crash site in the Andes. I was staring at the pictures, and for the first time, I got it. We would be shooting on a mountain. In the snow. On a mountain!

“Do you get altitude sickness?” Frank said at the audition. “You might be throwing up a lot at first, but you'll get used to it!”

Here I was, this dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, used to my creature comforts and my twenty-four-hour food delivery, but the more Frank and Kathy described how hard it was going to be, the more they made it seem like an amazing adventure—something I might be able to talk about for the rest of my life—if I lived through it, of course.

I came out of filming
Alive
not only alive, but reborn. Like all births, it didn't come without some pain and suffering. Yes, I threw up. Yes, it was freezing. Yes, there were times, I thought, I cannot do this. Yes, I had a nervous breakdown over a baked potato. But that's not what I remember. It's the first line of the movie: “We were part of a grand experience.” I couldn't have said it any better.

Let's start with what everyone remembers about the movie. The plane crash. There was never a time I saw
Alive
with an audience when the sequence didn't get applause. We shot that crash scene for four weeks. Imagine four weeks of getting dressed, made up, and reenacting the same horrific plane crash. Just the crash. We hadn't even got to the scenes yet. That's the attention to detail I had seen the day Frank and Kathy had shown me pictures and storyboards. By starting with the crash, they set the tone of the film, because it gave us discipline, and we all got to know each other very well during those long days buckled in our seats.

To create the images, they used different planes, each to create a different effect. For close-ups, your section of the plane was separated while a wind machine blew potato flakes in your face, or it was rotated at a 45-degree angle to better record your anguish. The moment I have been asked about the most is when two passengers are sucked out of the back of the plane. This was created by having a plane twenty feet in the air on a hydraulic lift, which was then dropped fifteen feet while two stuntmen attached to rigging were yanked out the back. The day that we shot it, we knew this was a big stunt, but none of us actually knew what was going to happen, because Frank wanted to record our genuine fear. Well, we were all in our seats on the set plane, and suddenly it dropped fifteen feet in the air. The guys went flying out the back. Instead of screaming and acting scared, everyone just gave this simultaneous “Whoaaaa!!!” as if we were on the best ride of our lives.

From over the loudspeaker we heard Frank say, “Cut. Cut…”

The plane slowly went back up the hydraulic lift to what was called “first position” to try it again. We knew we had ruined the take. Frank, bless his heart, came inside the plane shaking his head at us. We were bad kids. We felt terrible, but he was grinning at us. He said, “Don't do that again.”

We were miles away from any city, so Frank and Kathy went to a small town nearby called Invermere and rented out an entire theater for us. We used it to watch movies that might inspire us. Nothing current. Just classics that we had never seen, all with adventure themes, such as the original
Flight of the Phoenix
and
The Great Escape
. None of us had seen
The Warriors
, a movie Frank had worked on, so we put in a request for that. I can't remember enjoying a film more. I have a lasting memory of the cast of
Alive
hooting and hollering at the screen. Afterward, Frank told us stories about the filming of this Walter Hill classic. We bonded over nights like that, because the days on the mountain were long and challenging.

From the beginning, there was something familial about
Alive
. John Patrick Shanley—the Academy Award–winning screenwriter of
Moonstruck
—had written the script. In a hotel suite in Vancouver, the entire cast gathered to read the script aloud for the first time. We were all getting to know one another, and everyone was nervous and excited, wanting to do a good job, because John would be sitting there listening to us speak his words, which were so beautiful, they were like poetry. John wouldn't have any part of the seriousness. He volunteered to read the stage directions, which he did, acting out everything in a loud and boisterous manner, making everyone laugh. I was so happy to see John, who had always had faith in me. He gave me a hug after the reading and said, “What did I tell you? Did I tell you you'd be here?”

I had an association with John when I was working for Peggy Siegal. Peggy had done the publicity for
Moonstruck
. Some of my favorite conversations were talking to John while I was supposed to be working on
Moonstruck
. He was such a funny, humble, and talented artist. The fact that I had known him in my previous life made working on
Alive
seem like destiny, and he was thrilled that I would be playing Lilliana Methol, until the day I called him for some clarification about a line I was having an issue with. Frank had said to me, “John's the writer; you'll have to talk to him.”

In real life, Lilliana Methol had been eating the bodies of the dead before she died in the avalanche. For the film, John thought it worked better dramatically if Lilliana was revolted by the idea and died without ever eating the bodies. We were discussing the script and John said, “I don't want a comma out of place.” Needless to say, I did my scenes exactly as they were written. There was a time in movies that when an actress had an issue with the script, she spoke to the writer and respected his wishes.

But to this day I'm not sure he ever correctly explained why my character is singing Burt Bacharach's “The Look of Love” the night before she decides she will finally eat human flesh!

We all felt the responsibility of playing real people and were fortunate to have the actual survivors of the Andes crash there to guide us. I wrote in my journal, “I feel like Nando Parrado is God, because he was closer to God than anyone I have ever known.”

I was raised a Catholic, but I hadn't been to church for years. I was an actress. I was raised as a hippie. I didn't know what I believed in. I believed in movies. I believed Audrey Hepburn was a saint. I believed Billy Wilder was God. When we recited prayers in the film, like the real survivors had, with Nando there watching, it had a profound effect on all of us, and I think you can feel that in those scenes.

He told me, “There were so many times I could have died. My will to die was as strong as my will to live, but I know that God saved me. I must repay that debt every day by telling people how lucky they are to be alive.” One of the ways Nando expressed this enormous love he had inside him was by hugging you. Nando was a great hugger, and this became a real hugging movie. We were going through a lot of difficult emotions; sometimes you didn't know if it was about the film or a real incident. One time an actor was crying, “My dog died; my dog died,” and I said, “I'm so sorry; when did it happen?” And he looked at me very strangely and said, “When I was a kid.” It was an eerie moment. Nando just took a hold of the actor and started to hug him, while he experienced this long-repressed memory. Knowing that it was more important just to hold him, not judge him, Nando let the actor cry in his arms. He had this ability to hold you long and hard until you felt safe. You could truly feel the love he was radiating. One time we were shooting, and I scratched my cornea. This cloud appeared on my left eye, and I couldn't see out of it. Nando took me in his arms, and calmed me down. He personally wanted to take me to the hospital. It was a long drive, and I was pretty scared, but he just made me believe I was going to be OK. On the way back from the hospital we drove to this abandoned Western town where they had shot
The Grey Fox
. We walked the empty streets, looked out at the fields, and watched the sun go down together. He said to me that the most important thing for us to project in the film was that life was beautiful and worth living.